Bank failure in Japan: 128 banks “frozen” at once

Black Friday in the land of the yen. Bitcoiners have been repeating “Not your keys, not your coins” for more than a decade, and the mantra looped on X this November 6 as the alert “128 banks frozen in Japan” spread. ATMs, counters and apps throughout the west of the archipelago had just stopped responding.

The story is spectacular. The facts take place in a five and a half hour hardware failure, without a cyberattack or freezing of accounts, at a time when the country's three megabanks are preparing their yen stablecoin.

The key points of this article:

An equipment failure at the Western IT center knocked out 128 shinkin crates on Friday around 1:30 p.m. Tokyo time.

All services returned by 7:05 p.m., and the operator detected no intrusion.

The freeze scenario does not hold, but the dependence of 236 establishments on a common platform is very real.

Japanese bank outage lasted five and a half hours

The blockage starts around 1:30 p.m. in Tokyo, or 5:30 a.m. in Paris. Shinkin Central Bank and Shinkin Kyodo Center, which operates the network's shared computer system, notice that nothing is happening anymore.

Shinkin are regional cooperative funds, distant cousins ​​of our mutual banks. Their clientele? Mainly traders, craftsmen and local SMEs.

The 128 establishments from Tokai to Kyushu are affected, except Okinawa. Withdrawals, deposits and transfers become impossible at ATMs or at the counters of the 3,430 agencies concerned. Online banking is following the same path.

A merchant customer of Seishin Shinkin told the Shizuoka Asahi channel that he cannot afford to be without cash when he needs it.

The return takes place in stages. According to the ANN channel, all services are working again at 7:05 p.m.

128 frozen banks or a simple stranded server

The word “jellies” made the rounds among English-speaking and then French-speaking crypto accounts. He suggests a decision, that of an authority which would block withdrawals to stem a panic. However, no regulator moved, and no one waited in line to empty their account.

The Jiji agency reports that the operator ruled out any cyberattack in the afternoon, citing an equipment failure. The daily Asahi places the fault in the communications equipment of the central West, one of the two sites which run the common system. Other Japanese media point to a storage unit.

These 128 crates had also switched to an updated version of the system in mid-October, according to Sankei. ANN directly links the breakdown to this site.

The sales remained intact, simply out of reach for an afternoon.

A single shared system for 236 banks

The common system serves 236 of the country's 254 shinkin, or more than 90% of the network, with one site for the East and one for the West. When the second falters, half of the sector stops suddenly while the East continues to turn.

And this is not the archipelago’s first attempt. In October 2023, the Zengin interbank network crashed for the first time since its creation in 1973, with more than 5 million transactions delayed over two days. On January 29, 140 shinkumi credit unions in turn lost part of their services.

This is where the bitcoiners’ argument goes. The Bitcoin network does not have a Western center: thousands of nodes validate blocks, and on Friday they continued to do so. With your keys in hand, no one can stop you from moving your BTC at 1:31 p.m.